Xilinx Moves to AXI Protocol Fast

With the release of ISE 12.4 earlier in the year, 13.1 in last month, and the first 7-series Kintex device in production, Xilinx is moving fast to AXI (Advanced eXtensible Interface) protocol. AXI is one of the interface standard from ARM’s AMBA (Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture).

Here’s what happening:

• Embedded Processor is in PowerPC to ARM transition
• IP is moving to a single interconnect standard (AXI4) for Embedded, DSP and Connectivity domains
• MicroBlaze is in PLB to AXI transition since v8

Coming ISE release will support AXI only 7-series devices. Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 have both PLB and AXI support.

PetaLogix released PetaLinux SDK 2.1 in April with full support of ISE 13.1 and AXI. I was able to bring up PetaLinux with AXI bus easily by following Board Bringup Guide.

PetaLinux with AXI

One important difference between PLB and AXI is, MicroBlaze with AXI is in little endian.

I can’t wait for Zynq-7000 EPP coming out. And MicroBlaze/AXI with PetaLinux is a good head start.